I stopped, looking at her, and a faint pink rose in her cheeks.
“I don’t know what’s happening,” she said. “But things seem … very unsettled. To me.”
“Do you mean Nicodemus Partland?” I said bluntly. “And the men he’s meant to be bringing from Ninety-Six?”
The pink in her cheeks vanished like a frost-bitten flower.
“Hmph,” I said, and left.
Oliver was waiting for me on the porch, and at once offered to take the pack with the field kit.
“No, I’ll keep that. You take this one.” I handed him another pack, this one with water, honey-water, some food, a folded blanket, a jar of leeches, and a few other things that might come in handy. “All right, then—where shall we start?”
He looked off the porch, bewildered.
“I don’t know.” Nobody had slept last night, and neither had he. While a nice, cheerful young man, he was in fact not the brightest person I’d ever met. Now, between worry and exhaustion, he didn’t seem to have more than a few brain cells still working. I took a deep breath of morning air, summoning patience.
“Well, where did you see him last?” I asked.
This question invariably annoyed the members of my household searching for lost items, but Oliver Esterhazy blinked and then squinted in concentration, finally saying, “Near the Meeting House.”
“Then we’ll start there.”
“I already looked there.”
“We’ll start looking there.”
The rain had stopped, but the forest was dripping and my skirts were wet to the knee before we were halfway there. I didn’t mind. Birds were chirping, the air was alive with the sharp, fresh scents of red cedar and spruce, sprouting dogwood and rhododendron, and the mountainside was running with dozens of tiny rills and streams. Spring was in the air, and the peace of the morning wood was seeping into me, the anxiety of the night and the urgencies of the morning settling into something approaching perspective.
Jamie wasn’t dying or in any immediate danger of doing so. Everything else could be handled, and true to form, he was doing just that, even flat on his back and too weak to sit up by himself.
I still wanted to be with him, but he was right—there was no one else he could have sent, under the circumstances. Though his concern lest Lieutenant Esterhazy raise a mob of Loyalists seemed unnecessary at the moment. We saw and heard no one on the trail, and everyone seemed to be keeping deliberately out of sight. We knocked at two cabins on the way, to inquire after Lieutenant Bembridge, but were met with closed faces and negative shakes of the head.
The Meeting House itself was abandoned. The door had been left open, half the benches were overturned, beer was puddled on the floor, and two raccoons were inside, busily chewing on a Masonic apron that someone had dropped.
“Get out of here!” Oliver grabbed a broom that had also been knocked to the floor and drove the raccoons out with the fervor of an Old Testament prophet, then tenderly retrieved the remnants of the apron. It was a luxurious one, of white leather, with a white silk pleated edging and canvas ties, somewhat gnawed. The Masonic compass had been painted on it, with considerable skill.
“The captain’s?” I asked, watching him fold the garment, and he nodded.
Small accoutrements, like the wooden bucket and dipper for the refreshment of long-winded speakers and a stack of paper fans that the children had made for the coming summer, were scattered over the room. We stood for a moment in silence, looking at the wreckage, but neither of us chose to mention the irony—if that was the word—of a meeting of Freemasons, theoretically dedicated to the ideals of liberty, equality, and brotherhood, disintegrating into riot and mayhem. So much for not talking politics in Lodge …
We stepped outside and Oliver carefully closed the door. Then we walked to and fro in widening circles, shouting Gilbert Bembridge’s name.
“Would he perhaps have taken refuge with … one of the captain’s followers?” I asked delicately when we met again outside the Meeting House. “If he was wounded, perhaps?”
“I don’t know.” Oliver was growing agitated, glancing around as though expecting his friend to spring out from behind a tree. “I—I think maybe he was with the men who were, um …”
“Chasing my husband?” I said, rather acidly. “Which way did they go?”
He said he wasn’t sure, but set off downhill with a sudden burst of determination, me following more cautiously in order not to turn an ankle on the rocks and gravel the sudden freshets had left exposed on the trails.
I was beginning to think that there was something odd about Lieutenant Esterhazy’s behavior. He was sweating heavily, though the woods were still very cold, and though he cast aside from time to time, he did so in brief, erratic bursts before returning to a path of his own choosing. I rather thought he knew where he was going, and wasn’t really surprised when we suddenly came to a spot where the woods … weren’t.
We were standing at the edge of a copse of scraggy oak saplings, and below our feet, the ground fell away in a tumble of raw black earth, full of broken trees and shattered bushes, with great gray rocks that had been dislodged by the fall and now lay half buried in the dirt, their undersides exposed, stained and wet with mud and dislodged worms.
“Well,” I said, after a moment’s silence. “So this is the famous landslide. Were you here when it happened?”
He shook his head. His hair was coming out of its neat naval plait and straggled over his sweating face. He wiped it back, absently.
“No,” he said, then repeated, “No,” more definitely.
It wasn’t a huge landslide, though if one was standing at the bottom of it in the dark, it had probably been startling enough. About fifty feet of the mountainside had slipped, rumbling down a steep slope of granite and half blocking a small brook.
“Do you think—” the young man began, then stopped and swallowed, his oversized Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat. “Gilbert could be … in there?”
“I suppose it’s possible,” I said, eyeing the rubble dubiously. “If he is, though …” We were plainly not equipped to dig through a landslide with our bare hands, and I was on the point of saying so when the lieutenant grabbed my arm with a startled cry, pointing down.
“There! There!”
A smudge of navy blue, mud-smeared and nearly the color of the wet earth, was sticking out of the soil, about twenty feet from where we stood, and before I could say anything, Oliver was sliding and staggering through the wet clods, falling to one knee, then rising again and pushing onward.
I stumbled after him, gripping my emergency pack, though after the first convulsive leap, my heart had sunk like a stone. He couldn’t be alive.
Oliver had unearthed an arm and, leaping to his feet, heaved on it with all his might. I heard something crack and Gilbert’s head, with its dead-white face, burst from the ground in a shower of clods and gravel.
Oliver had let go Gilbert’s arm as though it were red-hot and was more or less gibbering in shock, but I didn’t have time to spare for him. I dropped to my knees and rubbed a hand hard over Gilbert’s face. I thought—but—no. I was right; I had seen a twitch of his eyelids—I saw it again now and my heart sprang into my throat.